Missing pieces of the window can be found etched into her face. She stares at herself in her mirror; eighteen deep reminders of him returning the search for her reflection.It’s not her face, the mirror’s just dirty.
They were perfect, Vogue worthy. Pictures line her room, enveloping her in pathetic attempts to conceal her now almost-perfect face. Almost-perfect, but not quite. He grins at her with a different girl on his shoulder; innocent, unscathed. She picks him up, always blushing in eighteen different places and throws him into the fire, burning black crevices into his still beautiful features.
Hi eternity.forever, happy new year!
ReplyDeleteThis is a really good attempt. However, after three reads, I find myself still a little confused. The way I see it, this girl had an accident in which she was left with a scarred face. Her lover left her because she wasn't beautiful enough. Is that right?
I'm not quite sure about 'blushing in eighteen different places'. It is unclear whether it is the man or the protag who is blushing.
You could tighten this writing a little. For example 'She stares at herself in her mirror' sounds a tiny bit clunky, with the repetetion of 'her'/'her(self)', and the fact that 'herself' is slightly redundent (what else would she see if she looked in a mirror?).
The fewer words you are allowed to play with, the tighter the writing has to be, I believe.
Like I say, though, this is a really good attempt at a drabble. You've successfully written a 100-word story, and quite cleverly the main part of the story is back-story. Yet it works. Nice one.
I’m really pleased you found the moderators comments on Task 43 helpful, and am really, really pleased that you’ve responded to them so brilliantly with this task! The concept – a woman abused and abandoned by her partner – is very similar to that of your submission for Task 43, but this piece is far more effective.
ReplyDeleteOne reason for this increased effectiveness is that here there is a more developed narrative. You open your piece with the startling, strange image of a scarred woman. ‘Eighteen deep reminders of him’ suggests the abuse this character has suffered. But why? What happened? You choose to withhold this information, and by doing so you increase the draw of the piece: the reader reads on in an attempt to resolve how the woman was hurt, and when they’ve finished reading are still left wondering. A change does still occur in this piece, though, as you depict the development of the woman’s emotional responses to her partner’s behaviour.
The language in which you do this is another reason this piece is stronger than your previous one. ‘The search for her reflection’ – fantastic! This shows the power of underwriting and implication; so much more affecting than ‘she was horribly scarred’, or its equivalent. The final two lines are also very good: I love ‘always blushing’ (implying the shame the woman’s scars cause her) and ‘burning black crevices into his still beautiful features’ (this symbolic attempt to ‘scar’ her partner is pathetic and moving).
Some of your language does still lack clarity: it took a few reads for me to realise that ‘missing pieces of the window can be found etched into her faces’ didn’t mean she has actual hunks of glass lodged in her cheeks (although ‘etched’ is a fine verb). ‘Pictures line her room, enveloping her in pathetic attempts to conceal her now almost-perfect face. Almost-perfect, but not quite’ is also problematic. The first use of ‘almost-perfect’ is another strong understatement, so don’t flip it into overstatement by repetition. Pictures “lining” a room is a bit familiar. I quite like ‘enveloping’ (it’s in that paper-y, picture-y semantic field), but you should be confident enough in the powers of your prose to have dropped ‘pathetic’ – the reader gets the pathetic nature of the situation through your descriptions of action and object without you stating the emotion.
I like the idea of ‘it’s not her face, the mirror’s just dirty’, but I think you’ve got a problem with voice here. The rest of the piece is narrated by a fairly traditional third-person limited narrator, but this sentence seems much closer to the woman’s mind, to being a vocalization of her very thoughts. A piece this short can’t really handle this shift of voice, so I would suggest that the line should be reworked.
Overall, though, a very, very good attempt. Well done!